On 2014-05-22, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
And *nobody* makes drivers for Solaris 10 these days. Oracle is
really killing the OS and the hardware with their more restrictive
licensing.
I'm no fan of MS, they are good only by comparison. Now that I'm
retired and don't have to know how to hack front office hand-me-downs
for lab use I think I'll look harder at *nix. The roadblock has been
lack of a Conexant Winmodem driver but I found an old external US
Robotics Sportster to try.
Winmodems are a real pain on other OS flavors because half the
modem is built into the OS -- and they really don't want to release the
information so someone else can write a driver to work with it in linux
or unix. They are really made to lock you in to Windows.
Do you really still *need* modems anyway?
Is Mint a good choice to just use for browsing, rather than study as
an art form?
I've never used (nor heard of) mint. I do most of my browsing
with FireFox on the Sun Blade 2000 systems -- with the problem of being
locked into older versions of Flash (which are known to have security
problems) so I minimize my use of Flash.
I've got NoScript running to limit what is using what, except
for certain trusted sites.
But if I need something with no limitations, I move to the
Ubuntu linux box (while still sitting at the keyboard of the Sun Blade
2000) and use the newer Firefox on that machine -- with newer flash and
such.
That is one of the benefits of unix machines. You can use ssh
to log onto another machine in your collection, and have it set $DISPLY
to point back to the machine you are sitting at, and you run the program
just like you would if you were sitting at the other machine. (SSH and
the X-11 Windowing system make it pretty seamless -- and you can't snoop
on the communication between the two systems, since SSH does
*everything* encrypted.
Enjoy,
DoN.
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